Vancouver corporation sends employees to personal development workshops ‘to work on the self first’

Photograph by: Jason Payne
, VANCOUVER SUN

“Sweat once a day” is printed on every Lululemon shopping bag. It’s part of the company’s manifesto.

It’s also tattooed on the forearm of at least one female participant of last weekend’s SeaWheeze half marathon. The corporation, which started with stretchy yoga wear and branched out later into technical running gear and other sportswear made of trademarked luon fabric, launched the race in 2012 with 7,500 participants.

This year 10,014 luon-clad runners raced the 21-kilometre route around downtown and the seawall: the event was capped at 10,000 but 14 extra were allowed to represent 14 years of Lululemon in Vancouver.

More than 70 per cent of the runners were from outside Vancouver, including a team of 125 runners from Austin, Texas. Someone proposed at the finish line — and she said yes. More than 2,000 people showed up for a sunset yoga class at Kits Beach the night before the race. Feverish crowds waited for hours to buy official SeaWheeze race gear from a pop-up store in the Convention Centre.

How does a company, founded by Chip Wilson in 1998 with one store on 4th Avenue, inspire such devotion to a brand that hardly ever advertises, and only identifies itself with small, subtle logos? (The logo is not an omega from the Greek alphabet, but rather a stylized letter A from “athletically hip,” a brand name that was discarded early on.)

Rare glimpse

Though the brand is highly visible in Vancouver, company representatives give few interviews and local media is rarely invited inside the Cornwall Avenue headquarters. As part of the SeaWheeze publicity tour, Lululemon executives pulled back the luon curtain to discuss how the company became such an international force with 225 stores in Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, and other showrooms in Europe and Asia.

“The brand was built through word of mouth and community. We’re becoming a global brand but we’re very much local in the communities in which we operate,” said Laura Klauberg, vice-president of global brand and community. Company representatives encourage local yoga instructors and athletes to become brand “ambassadors” to promote sales and product knowledge. Billboards are few and far between, and television advertising is non-existent. Print ads appear only in Yoga Journal.

Although menswear is growing in focus, the target market remains women — from teens to those in their mid-60s — who are interested in staying healthy and fit. Lululemon is designed with specific, hypothetical customers in mind: Ocean and her husband Duke.

Ocean is someone who is “super athletic, who is probably in (her) early 30s, who practices yoga, who probably is a runner, very successful in her career. There’s a very specific muse we create our product around,” Klauberg said.

Klauberg pointed to the shopping bags printed with aphorisms like, “Friends are more important than money” and “Have you woken up two days in a row uninspired? Change your life!”

“That is super inspirational to people. It inspires the way they live their life,” she said. “It’s about being healthy and living a great life ... It’s the clothes, but it’s more than the clothes. It’s a lifestyle brand and the clothes are the catalyst to changing people’s lives.”

The cult-brand status not only drives sales — Lululemon’s revenue has grown to $1.37 billion in 2012 from $40.7 million in 2004 — but also draws devotees to the retail stores and head office.

“My kids are always teasing me. They like to say to me I drank the Kool-Aid. And I say maybe I drank it, but it’s such good Kool-Aid. Who doesn’t want to live their best life and be so happy to go to work?” Klauberg said.

That ethos is pervasive in Lululemon culture. On social media, employees upload photos of themselves doing yoga with the hashtag #blissarmy. And, during a recent tour of HQ the perky staff, decked out in bright yellows and sporty, patterned shorts, were more than happy to discuss their life dreams.

If it seems strange to have your boss ask about your marriage or your weight-loss goals, it’s perfectly normal here. They are written out and framed on the wall for all to see.

Part of the initiation and training in the company, known as “on-boarding,” involves setting your vision and goals, referred to as one unit, “vision-and-goals,” in company parlance. From the first week of training, and from the part-time sales clerk (“educator”) to the top execs, vision-and-goals forms a major part of everyday working life.

“In terms of core values and having the vision-and-goals, those things are really in our DNA,” said Margaret Wheeler, senior vice-president of Human Resources (“People Potential”).

“We have a really good focus on self-development. It’s one of the things you’ll notice that’s the most different at Lululemon than other places.”

Other companies, she said, try to develop their employees “from the outside in,” with coaching and professional training. “What we try to do is work on the self first. You’ll see that with personal responsibility, with the opportunity to attend (personal development workshops at) Landmark as a choice, with setting a vision for all aspects of our life. That’s actually the core of it.”

Employees are expected to re-examine their personal, health and career goals twice a year, and check in with them as often as possible. Goals come up in conversation, in meetings and in settings like the in-house yoga studio, which has classes running from 7:30 a.m.

The whole package

“You’re a whole brain, a whole body, a wholehearted person. You should be focusing on all these things. When your life is firing on all cylinders — so when home’s working, personal’s working, career’s working, health is working — you’re going to be great at work. It’s just going to happen,” Wheeler said.

She would not divulge turnover rates, but did say it’s “an interesting conversation” at Lululemon. In some ways, employees are encouraged to leave. “If people leave for the right reason, we’re really happy.”

Chloe Gow-Jarrett, who’s been a goal coach for 11 years, ultimately wants to open an organic restaurant with her husband. But for now she runs vision-and-goals workshops. Lululemon has, she said, “a transformational corporate culture.”

It’s an adjustment at first and some new hires describe a culture shock. “To bring your whole self, that just feels weird,” Gow-Jarrett said. “It’s a rewarding and challenging culture in a lot of ways.”

The concepts Gow-Jarrett uses are based on similar ones used by goal gurus like Brian Tracy. While still running Westbeach, a clothing company he sold in 1997, founder Chip Wilson spent a lot of time driving Pacific Northwest highways, and would listen to Tracy’s audio tapes in the car. He realized he could bring personal development to his employees, which now number around 5,000.

Employees are encouraged to “put blinders to the past. Don’t look back there for evidence. Look forward and declare what you want,” Gow-Jarrett said. They imagine snapshots from an ideal life 10 years in the future, like a corkboard in a bright office or a kitchen window with kids playing outside.

They write it down in a mind map, make a list of wants and don’t-wants, answer the questions, “Who am I in 10 years?” and, “In 10 years what am I helping to bring into the world?” among other self-reflective questions.

And all employees pledge to help one another meet the deadline (“by-when date”). That’s why goals are posted outside most offices, and why your boss might ask not only how that sales report is coming along, but if you’re still trying to work out four times a week, and extend an offer of help or support.

“It shows up in the work your people ask you to do, because they’re enrolled in their goals,” said Erin Hochstein, who does communications for the company.

The concept of “enrolment” comes from Landmark, a worldwide company — which boasts that 94 per cent of participants have made “profound, lasting difference in the way they live their lives” — that’s based on the philosophy that limits are self-imposed. All employees are strongly encouraged to attend after one year with Lululemon.

It hosts three-day workshops, which also take place in five cities across Canada including Vancouver, to help “remove the constraints of the past” for $670 a pop. It has courted controversy over the years, leading to charges from some observers that it encourages cultlike adherence and employs overzealous recruitment tactics.

Independent thinking

But spokeswoman Deborah Beroset Miller, who started taking workshops in 1998, said there is no philosophy, no religion and “nothing to believe in,” except self-empowerment and “the tools to become aware of how you are operating.”

“Here’s the ironic thing: people coming out of these programs tend to be thinking more independently than perhaps they ever have in their lives,” Beroset Miller said.

Organizations like Apple, Mercedes-Benz USA, NASA and the U.S. Navy have all sent employees to Landmark’s flagship forum, during which participants respond to a “led inquiry,” or questions that probe how you might have arrived at a world view like “I am not leadership material,” or “my marriage is failing,” she said.

“It’s not like we tell you what to say to your boss or what to do in the meeting. We don’t do anything like that. What happens in the course is that somebody suddenly sees they have had this view of themselves and they get to create a new view if they want.”

Participants are then pushed to make phone calls during the session to establish a new connection from an old, painful relationship. It can be uncomfortable, Beroset Miller said, “but so is the status quo.” She once phoned her father to tell him she realized he wasn’t emotionally unavailable — she had been closed off. Others call their bosses or exes to dredge up and get closure on old failures with promises to do better, to take responsibility.

She dismissed the criticism of Landmark as an “old story,” she said. “Anytime you have something that doesn’t fit easily into a traditionally recognized paradigm or framework, people don’t know quite what to do with it.”

There was no “a-ha” moment for Lululemon’s Whistler store manager Susan Elmas when she first attended Landmark five years ago. “I don’t know if I can really explain precisely my specific learning,” she said, but “it’s given me an ability to be introspective that I didn’t have before.”

As a manager she now sees her role as one of supporting her staff in their vision-and-goals — as well as educating them on the yoga pants and other products that have made the company so successful.

“There’s lots of opportunities for people that work with the company to explore their personal and professional development. We consider it all the same — they go hand in hand. That’s been profound for me,” Elmas said. “But I have the same amount of vacation as other companies offer. I don’t get to go off on yoga retreats unfortunately.”

Not everyone is sold on the Lululemon way. Krystyn Peterson worked as an educator for just a few months in 2011, intrigued by the free yoga classes, the company’s support for athletes, and as an experiment. “I thought it would be interesting,” she said. “Just not so interesting (that) it was unbearable.”

Peterson hated the homework: hours of Brian Tracy recordings, a Lululemon library that included Ayn Rand’s dystopian individualism, the goal-setting on the company’s watch.

“I felt unaligned politically with that association,” she said. “It was certainly like new-age, faux-spirituality neo-liberal ideology clad in luon.”

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